Question

I have been trying to solve this problem all day but haven’t got any solution, so could you please help me?
Here is the problem description:
The Program should be able to display the bread crumb trail for a given
Category/SubCategory.
Ex:
Input : Public Relations
Output : Business & Finance >> Advertising & Marketing >> Public Relations.

Here Business & Finance is the primary category, Advertising & Marketing is its sub category and public relations is sub category of Adv & marketing.

I thought about implementing it using recursion, but i am not quite sure how to do it.

Thanks,
Jimmy

Answer 1

Assuming it is plain Ruby you could do something like this:

class Category
  def initialize name, parent = nil
    @name = name 
    @parent = parent
  end

  def display
    @parent ? "#{@parent.display} >> #{@name}" : name
  end

  def name
    @name
  end
end

and use it like so

1.9.2p320 :046 > c = Category.new "Parent"
 => #<Category:0x000001009c46d0 @name="Parent", @parent=nil> 
1.9.2p320 :047 > sub = Category.new "Sub", c
 => #<Category:0x000001009bf860 @name="Sub", @parent=#<Category:0x000001009c46d0 @name="Parent", @parent=nil>> 
1.9.2p320 :048 > sub.display
 => "Parent >> Sub"